Freshwater in Philadelphia
We know water is important for all living things, but often we are unaware of the sources of water in our city. Where is freshwater in the city and how does it flow?
Streams to Sewers
As the population of Philadelphia grew, there was more waste to get rid of. People used the streams to carry the waste they made away. Streams became the ‘conveyor belts’ for trash created in their homes but also for their human waste. Having open sewer waste was a stinking mess and an unhealthy way to live. The City needed to find a solution. They decided to encapsulate (enclose) the streams into pipes. Doing so meant they needed to fill in the land around these new pipes. many of Philadelphia’s natural waterways have become its underground sewer system . They will learn why those changes happened and describe the effects, both positive and negative, on human health and the health of our waterways. City engineers built sewers in the areas of the city’s streams and creeks, essentially enclosing the natural waterways with pipes. This often changed the direction of the water as it moved through what was once natural unbuilt land.
The urban water system exists as a cycle, just like the natural water is a cycle. In what we call the urban water use cycle, each part of the cycle is critical in the management of our urban water system.
In a bustling city the size of Philadelphia with over a million people, it is a big task to manage our water system – clean, safe water to consume at the tap. Of equal importance is managing our wastewater and storm water – cleaning up what we flush or send down the drain (out of sight and out of mind) , and what runs off our streets and rooftops down storm drains.
All of this is managed by a vast system of pipes, pumps, plants (both the green kind and the building facilities kind!) and is often hidden from view. This system can be described as infrastructure – the basic physical and organizational structures and facilities (e.g. buildings, roads, power supplies) needed for the operation of a society or enterprise.
We call this continuous movement of water through our infrastructure the urban water use cycle – from the freshwater river intakes as the source to the freshwater river outfalls returned.
The development of Philadelphia’s public drinking water supply system began more than 200 years ago, but continues today with 3 drinking water filtration facilities operating 24/7 in the service of providing clean, safe water. Its history is a complex narrative of public health challenges, innovative engineering and hard-working people that inextricably links Philadelphia to its local waterways in a long-term symbiotic relationship with water
What follows is freely edited from Nelson M Blake, Water for the Cities: A History of the Urban Water Supply Problem in the United States (Syracuse University Press, 1956), and the Water Course (4 Modules) , which can be found at Water History PHL
As colonial Philadelphia grew into the nation’s capital, it could not always boast about clean, fresh and abundant drinking water. Where once, early settlers had relied on wells and streams for a water supply close to where they lived, a more populated and thriving city was now challenged to find a new source of water as these sources became polluted because of the increased population.
Bounded by two rivers, Philadelphia had numerous choices for an alternative source of its water supply. The Delaware River was deemed unsatisfactory as it was a major port, with all the pollution associated with port activity, as well as the action of the tide and the proximity of marshland. The city leaders decided to make providing water a municipal responsibility, with a city-owned water works, rather than a system built by a private company, which would then lease it back to the city. The water source finally chosen, the Schuylkill River, was fast-flowing, was removed from the City’s population center at that time, and had an extensive upstream watershed, tributaries and undeveloped land that ensured a steady, clean supply.
THE BEGINNING OF THE PHILADELPHIA WATER SYSTEM
By 1801, Philadelphia’s first public system opened. It was designed and engineered to pump river water (surface water) for the drinking water supply from the Schuylkill River at 24th and Chestnut Street by steam engine to a water works at Centre Square, where Philadelphia City Hall stands today. From here, it was distributed to the city through wooden pipes made from hollowed out logs to flow to hydrants, pumps, businesses and dwellings. It is interesting to note that, even though the city was planned to encourage development along both rivers, in 1801, Centre Square was not the heart of the city plan as it is today, as most of the city developed from the Delaware River to about 7th street, from Vine to South Street (today’s street names). As with any new system, challenges with machinery and management ensued and improvements were required. A new and improved system was designed along the banks of the Schuylkill River with a much larger reservoir capacity built on a high spot called the Faire Mount — called the Fairmount Water Works .
THE SYSTEM GROWS
From 1815 through 1845, Fairmount Water Works was the sole pumping station, supplying Philadelphia with water, (and for part of that time it also supplied the districts of Spring Garden, Northern Liberties, and Southwark). By the early 1820s, after water power replaced steam power , which used expensive fuel to power the pumps, the financial rewards for the city were considerable. In 1854, under the Act of Consolidation passed by the Pennsylvania legislature, the City of Philadelphia absorbed the other 29 municipalities in the County of Philadelphia, creating a much-enlarged 129-square mile city. By so doing, Philadelphia took on the task of providing a wide range of services for a much-expanded population, including police and fire protection, the construction of new streets, bridges and other infrastructure, sewerage and stormwater drainage, sanitation and public health, as well as continuing to provide a safe water supply.
By this point in the city’s history, Fairmount Water Works had been joined by 3 other water works, supplying Northern Liberties and Spring Garden (opened 1845), Germantown and Mt. Airy (1851) and Kensington (1851). Several others were added in the years that followed. During the second half of the 19th century, assuring the safety of the water supplied by the various water works in the city became an increasingly difficult problem, the solution of which involved the largest expenditure by the city on any single project up to that point.
PROTECTING THE WATER SUPPLY
In 1828, one of the first comprehensive laws against pollution of the Schuylkill River was passed by the Pennsylvania legislature. The law mandated, in its quaint legalese, a fine of $50 for any violators who “willfully take, lead, conduct, or carry off, or shall knowingly suffer or permit to be taken, led, conducted, or carried off, any offal or any putrid, noxious, or offensive matter, from any dye house, still house, brew house, or tan yard, or from any manufactory whatever, into that part of the river Schuylkill which is between the dam at Flat Rock and the dam at Fair Mount.”
The act further forbade pollution of the river close to the Fairmount Water Works with “any dead animal, or any putrid or corrupt thing whatsoever, or any noxious or offensive matter of any kind.” It also outlawed swimming, by people or dogs, within 100 yards of the headrace, which conducted water into the Fairmount Water Works. Similar laws, which often expanded the list of prohibited activities and increased the amount of fines for violations, were passed in subsequent years.
The creation of a park around Fairmount beginning in the mid-19th century, besides providing a pleasure-ground for the people of Philadelphia, was also intended to protect the quality of the river water, and was a direct response to the current and potential industrial upstream development along the Schuylkill riverfront. In fact, when the Park was expanded after the Civil War, many mills and factories upstream from Fairmount, along the Schuylkill River and Wissahickon Creek, were bought by the city and demolished.
In 1868, Fairmount Park was enlarged to more than 2000 acres with the purchase of land on both banks of the Schuylkill River. One goal of this purchase, and a later purchase of land along Wissahickon Creek, was to protect water quality in the river, which by then was used as source water for four drinking water pumping stations in Philadelphia.
In spite of these precautions, the state of the Schuylkill, and of drinking water drawn from it at 4 separate pumping stations—Shawmont, Belmont, Spring Garden, and Fairmount—continued to deteriorate. One of the problems was even if Philadelphia had been able to completely eliminate pollution of the river within the city limits, it had no direct control over the sewage and industrial pollution from communities upstream. Communities within Philadelphia, such as Manayunk, also continued to pollute the river. In 1883, the city began building an intercepting sewer along the east bank of the river. This pipe captured sewage and industrial waste which would have otherwise flowed into the river and carried it to a point of discharge below the Fairmount Dam, out of the reach of any water supply intake pipes. While this sewer did help reduce waste flows into the river, pollution continued to get into the river, from household sewage and waste from industries who refused to connect to the interceptor.
PROTECTING PUBLIC HEALTH
Around the time of the Civil War, the needs of an exploding population, attracted to the city by its burgeoning manufacturing capacity, began to strain the capacity of the city’s water system. Between 1860 and 1890, Philadelphia’s population almost doubled, growing from 565,529 to 1,046,964. In this same period, the city produced an incredible array of goods in hundreds of factories, employing thousands of men, women, boys and girls. By this time, most factories employed steam engines as a power source, but many still located alongside the city’s two rivers and their many tributary streams, used the streams as a water source for industrial processes, and as a convenient place to dump their wastes.
To serve the drainage needs of homes and businesses not directly next to the rivers and streams, the city built hundreds of miles of underground sewers which carried wastes to the nearest stream. All of this waste, both industrial waste and human sewage, was dumped with no disinfection or other treatment. The only intercepting sewer at that time was along the Schuylkill River, and sewage treatment plants were still many decades in the future. By polluting the two rivers that were the source of its water supply, Philadelphia, similar to many other cities, was like a bird fouling its own nest.
As harmful as industrial pollution can be, the point can be argued that the huge amount of human waste entering the drinking water supply was the most dangerous and deadly. These wastes, which contained microbes carrying a variety of water-borne diseases, caused repeated epidemics of various illnesses, particularly typhoid fever. Before a solution was adopted, thousands of Philadelphians would die and many more thousands were sickened from drinking polluted water from their household taps. By the late 19th century, the city would face a public health crisis as serious as that posed by yellow fever a century earlier, but this time the problem truly was in the water.
THE DEBATE BEGINS
With this mounting evidence, health professionals in Philadelphia, and in other similarly-afflicted cities, began to link the transmission of diseases, such as typhoid fever and cholera, to the city’s water system. “Anti-contagionists” cited the clarity of water, witnessed by the naked eye after it had undergone gravity settling, as testimony of its purity. However, their point of view became more and more marginalized, as evidence mounted for spread of disease by microscopic germs.
By the end of the 19th century, the polluted nature of Philadelphia’s water supply was obvious. By then, the only question was the method the city would use to obtain a pure water supply: filtration of the existing supply, or bringing a cleaner supply to the city from other sources using aqueducts.
Not surprisingly, the physicians who treated all these sick and dying patients, were among the first to suggest a purer water supply might reduce incidence of disease. Their call was echoed by city-sponsored water commissions in 1875 and 1886, both of which recommended abandoning the city’s 2 polluted rivers for purer upstate water delivered by aqueducts to Philadelphia. Alternatively, by the 1890s, several European and American cities had built successful filtration plants, and this was increasingly seen as a cheaper but still viable solution to the city’s water woes.
In the 1890s, a resident of Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood, Frank J. Firth, became active in the fight for clean water. A long-time proponent of filtration, Firth organized more than 70 organizations (including many physicians’ groups) into the City Organizations Filtration Committee, which lobbied the City Councils to fund filtration. The Women’s Health Protective Association, another advocacy group, invited knowledgeable scientists and engineers to the city to speak about the water issue and to propose solutions.
Convincing City Councils was no easy task, and their continued inaction through the 1890s promoted a number of private firms (some of them well-intended, others mere get-rich-quick schemes for their backers) to offer their solutions. Some Councilmen, stuck on the antiquated “anti-contagionist” view, remained unconvinced bacteria were indeed deadly. One thing was clear: a solution to the city’s water problem was going to cost millions, and then as now, getting elected officials to agree to such a large expenditure was a drawn-out and laborious process
FILTRATION IS THE SOLUTION
In 1909, the Fairmount Water Works was decommissioned and water filtration began. In 1896, John C. Trautwine, Jr., chief engineer of the Water Department, came close to receiving approval for an experimental filtration plant, but the idea was defeated when some councilmen complained it would be unfair to provide filtered water for one neighborhood, while others had to suffer with the polluted variety. Finally, in 1899, under the leadership of newly elected Mayor Samuel H. Ashbridge, consensus was reached. The Mayor appointed a new water commission, which recommended filtration as the best alternative.
Between 1900 and 1911, Philadelphia built a system of 5 sand filtration plants on high ground along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers, near the city’s upstream boundaries to access the cleanest water within city limits. High ground was preferred because gravity flow was more cost-effective than pumping, yet even so, to get water to the highest parts of the city, a new reservoir in Oak Lane and 5 high-service pumping stations also had to be constructed. A new pumping station was also constructed at Lardner’s Point (at that time the largest such pumping station in the world) to take water from the new Torresdale filters (then the largest single filter plant in the world) and distribute it to reservoirs throughout the city.
The filtration plants at Upper and Lower Roxborough were completed in 1903, at Belmont in 1904, and at Torresdale in 1909. Early that year, a key interconnection within the distribution system finally allowed filtered water from Torresdale to reach parts of the City previously without it. For the first time, on March 1, 1909, every Philadelphian living or working in a building with city water service received filtered water. The Queen Lane Filters, a late addition to the filtration scheme which was not completed until 1911, provided additional capacity to serve the city’s still-growing population.
Absent from the plans was the addition of filters to several older pumping stations, including the Spring Garden and Fairmount Water Works, which were taken out of service in 1909. As evidenced by the now-negligible death rates from typhoid and other water-borne diseases, this system has served Philadelphians well for the past 100 years. Water filtration accomplished what its advocates of a century ago predicted, saving many lives and improving the overall health of the city.
DRINKING WATER SYSTEM TODAY
Today, the treatment plants provide 3 barriers against disease: disinfection with sodium hypochlorite; gravity settling enhanced with chemical coagulants; and filtration through sand and crushed coal. Treatment of sewage before it enters our streams, a process which also includes disinfection, reduces the risk that disease-causing organisms will be present in the City’s water supply.
By building water filtration plants which rendered polluted river water safe to drink, if not always palatable, Philadelphia put off the need to remove pollutants entering the rivers from household and industrial sewage. Enhancements to the water treatment process were added to the filtration plants in the 1950s. A comprehensive plan for collection and treatment of the city’s sewage, developed in 1914, was also fully realized in the 1950s. While the city’s first sewage treatment plants removed about half of the pollutants in the waste stream, upgrades made in the 1970s and 1980s remove up to 95% of the pollutants, producing effluents that are as clean as, or cleaner than, the river water itself.
With the city’s 3rd century of public water supply underway, the Philadelphia Water Department continues to use the best science and engineering available to ensure the city’s drinking water meets all national, state, and local standards for drinking water quality, while protecting our environment and making Philadelphia a healthier city. The Department’s scientists and engineers continue to monitor and improve the water supply. They are implementing innovative ways to prevent pollutants from entering our water sources, while simultaneously conducting research to find new means of removing extremely small concentrations of contaminants from the drinking water.
IMPACTS OF STORMWATER RUNOFF ON OUR WATERWAYS
When stormwater runoff reaches our waterways the ecological balance suffers. Trash creates a risk for wildlife that might mistake it for food. Chemicals, such as motor oil and pesticides, can be toxic to those same animals. Fertilizers can cause algae to grow out of control and hog the oxygen supply in the water. Too much animal waste can introduce unhealthy levels of bacteria into the water system. These are considered water quality issues.
In 1989, Congress passed an amendment to the Clean Water Act that required municipal operators of sewer systems to develop infrastructure that would reduce non-point source pollution and combined sewer overflows during rain events. Philadelphia’s response has been the Green City Clean Waters Program. Green stormwater infrastructure mimicking nature is being developed throughout the city to reduce stormwater runoff.
COMBINED VS. SEPARATE SEWER SYSTEMS
The City of Philadelphia’s sewer system is comprised of both combined and separate sewer systems. A combined sewer system (CSS) is simply a single sewer system that carries both sewage and stormwater in one pipe, to a water pollution control plant for treatment before being released to a waterway. During moderate to heavy rainfall events, the system will reach capacity, overflow, and discharge a mixture of sewage and stormwater directly to our streams and rivers from the 164 permitted Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) outfalls within the City. This is a water quality and quantity issue. Sixty percent of the City of Philadelphia, or 64 square miles, is within the combined sewer system drainage area. Four watersheds, generally comprised of the older areas of the City of Philadelphia, receive CSO discharges.
The remainder of the City of Philadelphia’s sewer system is drained by what is called a separate sewer system. A separate sewer system collects stormwater in a storm sewer pipe and discharges it directly to a waterway, while the sanitary sewage collected from homes, businesses, and industry is collected in a sanitary sewer pipe and taken to the water pollution control plant for treatment before being released to the waterways.